Ditko and the Beauty of Abstraction

Although Steve Ditko’s art has always been, in a large sense, representational, his work features some of the most highly abstract cartooning seen in mainstream comics. This is especially true in "The Dimensions of Greed," a story in the anthology Time Warp #3, (March 1980; DC). If we removed the human figures from these two pages (which appear side-by-side in the comic), the context for understanding the ‘objects’ and the narrative spaces you are seeing would disappear:

Ditko's version of an imaginary Martian machine owes less to contemporary science fiction and more to familiar cartoon abstractions. Take this panel for example:

There’s a giant 'paint splat' surrounded by a fuzzy 'lightning bolt':

Even though a cartoon 'paint splat' has a representational connection to an actual one, here that connection is severed, for the nature of the object is unknown - it's just a gesture, a play of form and color. In the standard cartoon idiom, a splat would represent an action; here it may be an action or just a thing: in other words, in the grammar of this scene it could be either a subject or a verb.

Some 'cobweb'-like figurations:

Many shapes suggest a flower seen through the fragmented prism of a kaleidoscope:

At first, it’s almost hard to perceive these two creatures in the panel as life-forms--if that’s what the green shape (a rabbit/fish?) on the left and the red one on the right are intended to evoke:


In this three-panel sequence, the narrative aspect itself is almost abstract, seen in the panel-to-panel transformation of the shapes that make up the door:


In this panel, a character appears to comment ironically on the issues of representation and recognition; it’s obvious to Dick and Leo that it’s a city, but we might not think so if they hadn’t told us:


Perception depends heavily on context.

Ditko’s art in "The Dimensions of Greed" employs a play of distorted shapes and heightened exaggeration; and like this story, much of his work has an unrecognized sense of humor and playfulness. While many of the stories he draws grapple with ‘heavy’ themes (crime, justice, moral and psychological dilemmas, etc.), Ditko’s art often recalls the comical traditions of cartooning. And it looks like it would be fun to draw -- There's often a real feeling of joy to his art.

In this page from "Escape" (reprinted in Space Adventures #11, 1978; Charlton), Ditko's abstraction takes a more minimalist and geometrical approach. Underneath a highly stylized city (again, so abstract that the reader might not recognize it as such without textual clues), a man runs in the first panel:
He says, "It looks like a street" but it’s just a series of circles or ovals floating in space. The next panel introduces, as the ‘ground’ of this world, a triangle and a cross, as well as two yellow triangles and other shapes created by the panel borders and the lines that define the purple cross and triangle:

The last panel above features a different kind of abstraction: Ditko literally abstracts (in the sense of removing) almost all sense of the physical context in which the figures ‘stand’ (except for the small shadow under a foot). The art in this story is sparse to begin with; but this scene takes that a step further, as each consecutive panel has less visual information.

Note how the floor of his "home" changes shape in the story's final two panels: a square surrounded other four-sided irregular shapes a series become all squares—and the oval shape of his room itself seems to become square:

What's that big black ink area in the lower corner? Is it intentional or a Charlton printing error? [It oddly extends below the plane of the panel borders into the margin.] Either way, it fits with the abstract strangeness of the images.

So often, Ditko is not interested in representing, in either a literal or conventional way, what the writer asks for; and this tendency is part of what makes his work so singular; he seems to rewrite the narrative as he draws it, making the finished story far subtler and stranger than what’s suggested by the script. Ditko is one of the few artists who can consistently take a mediocre script and make something special from it. And too often readers focus on Ditko's thematic concerns and not his formal innovations . . .

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Ditko and "Word v. Picture"

In The World of Steve Ditko, Blake Bell recounts a story about the editing of Ditko’s Static, which appeared in the first three issues of Eclipse Monthly in 1983. Dean Mullaney altered Ditko’s script for the episode in #2 because he felt it was “too wordy, and visually unappealing.” (Bell agrees with Mullaney’s assessment, noting that Ditko’s debt to Ayn Rand “continued to have an impact on the quality of the storytelling” (145).) Ditko rejected the changes, and the story ran as he intended.

Mullany’s criticism reflects a common belief about comics storytelling: comics is primary a visual medium and so the text must always be dramatically subordinated (at least in terms of the amount of space it fills per panel) to the image. But I think the intensity of Ditko’s sequence visually depends upon the fact that, moving through the first three panels, the words take up an increasing amount of space as the image area decreases (with the fourth panel echoing the first):

The third panel brings the focus solely on the image of Mac’s calm, yet intense eyes, surrounded by his philosophical argument:

To lessen the text would be to lose the visual effect – the art would read differently, featuring more of the character and diminishing the focus on the eyes (a Ditko hallmark). The words function both as a visual frame and as dialogue; the image becomes an extreme close-up because of the text, not because of the “camera-to-subject” distance, a uniquely comics effect.

Here is the passage in context. Ditko frames the part of the conversation that takes place on this page with parallel long shots with full figures (panels 1 [figures are stationary] and 7 [figures in motion]):

It’s true that pages four and five of this story are relatively ‘text heavy,’ but the pages before and after return to a much more conventional word/text ratio. This fact gives the story a kind of rhythm clearly intended by Ditko, one in which conversation-heavy pages are followed by action sequences:

If we look at Ditko's independent comics in the period, we find a real diversity of text/image ratios. In many ways, page 5 from EM #2 is an exception, that like Ditko's text-minimalist pages (e.g. 1985's "The Expert"), demonstrates the considerable attention he paid to the issue.

It seems that Mullaney was not thinking of Ditko as a cartoonist and designer, but as a writer whose characters spoke too much for the tastes of 1980s comic fans, who Mullaney likely believed (and was certainly right), wanted more action than dialogue. Readers often come to Ditko with narrow expectations about how the comics page should look and strict rules about the visual balance between word and picture. They often wish that Ditko remained “faithful” to the corporate storytelling principles that governed his mainstream work, especially his 1960s Marvel comics. Although I enjoy this work, his independent comics (and his Charlton work with Joe Gill) reveal an artist constantly expanding comics’ visual and verbal aesthetics. And you can look at the word-picture ratio on pages by artists such as Kevin H. and Ivan Brunetti and trace a formal lineage back to Ditko:

From Brunetti's Schizo #2.

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Ditko: Static?

In his recent book on Steve Ditko, Blake Bell uses the above page as evidence of his claim that Ditko's late '90s work is characterized by a "positioning of characters [within a scene that] was static, with characters standing straight up in the same position from panel to panel" (167). But I think Bell's criticism is off; he looks at the figures, but does not take into account the many ways in which Ditko's figure placement and posture relate to the narrative.

In panels 2-5, the character Reck is at his parole hearing. The stiff, upright position of the figure in panel 2, flanked on the left by the parole board and the right by a prison guard, suggests Reck's outwardly submissive posture (with semi-clenched fists to suggest his internal tension) while standing in front of those who would determine his fate. Bell says that "characters are standing straight up in the same position," yet the 'camera' position and size of the figure change (as does how much of him is visible) from 2 to 3 to 4. And we would expect a prisoner at a crucial hearing to stand unusually still. What's of primary interest to Ditko seems to be the way the character's body and face reveal different things throughout the sequence. And he creates visual interest (the thing that Bell claims his later work lacks) in a number of ways, such as by waiting a panel to reveal the character's face and by moving closer to the subject in each consecutive panel.

The pairs of panels -- 2-3 and 5-6 -- are set up to mirror each other.

In the first pair, Reck is on the inside (in prison), in the second pair, the outside. In panel 2 and 5 Reck stands in the same position, as Bell notes, but the reason for this seems clear. The demeanor he takes in the hearing is initially the same as that he takes upon his release -- he has to face people on the outside for the first time in 20 years. Both panels suggest a kind of temporary paralysis that he feels in the presence of others. Here, as in 2, he is flanked by three people on his left (both panels feature 2 background men and 1 woman). In panel 6 Reck puts his hand on the train's window, and comments on the paradoxical symbolism of his situation: he is 'trapped' inside the train, but free from the bars of the prison. His dialogue in this panel ("But it's # better than behind bars") and the box of the window also refer us back to the bars of the prison gate in panel 1:



Note how the lines on the glass echo the direction of some of the bars.

And the images of a still Reck in panels 2-6 find their release in the last, and largest, panel of the page; now Reck is free and in motion:
[And note the variety of postures of the characters in this panel: the different angles of their heads, the hand gestures; some people are standing, others are in motion . . .]

I think that Ditko sets this sequence up very carefully, and it's indicative of the fact that his storytelling and design/layout skills are clearly visible in the later work.

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